Samizdat source code repository moves from CVS to Monotone

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

Greetings everyone,

The recent Savannah outage[0] has nearly wiped out Samizdat CVS
repository, among others. Thankfully, Savannah hackers have managed to
restore the data, but it doesn't mean that we will be so lucky next
time.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-users/2009-05/msg00023.html

This emergency is a final reminder that it's time to catch up with the
times and switch to a distributed version control system: among other
good things, a DVCS will allow developers and other users to keep an
up-to-date local copy of the whole history of the project development.

As of today, development of Samizdat moves from CVS to Monotone.[1]

[1] http://monotone.ca/

Since Savannah doesn't support Monotone, the repository is hosted at
mtn-host.prjek.net. To pull a copy of Samizdat repository into a new
local Monotone database and checkout the latest Samizdat code, do:

    mtn db init --db=~/samizdat.mtn
    mtn --db=~/samizdat.mtn pull samizdat.mtn-host.prjek.net 'samizdat-*'
    mtn --db=~/samizdat.mtn --branch=samizdat-head checkout samizdat

You might notice that the Monontone revision history is a bit more
fine-grained than that in CVS. That would be because since May 2005, I
used Monotone to track my changes to Samizdat, and manually propagated
these to the public CVS repository. CVS sync points are marked in
Monotone revision history with "CVS <Y-m-d>" commit messages.

I will no longer do that: CVS repository will remain available for some
time in frozen state, and after a while will disappear off the face of
the Net. I will, however, maintain a Git mirror of Monotone repository
at Savannah[2] using Monotone git_export command.

[2] https://savannah.nongnu.org/git/?group=samizdat

The Git mirror is just a convenience for people who know Git and don't
want to figure out Monotone, or who want to use fancy tools that are
only available for Git, or who, like myself, find ViewMTN web interface
awkward in comparison to cgit. It is by no means a way to commit changes
to Samizdat: the only way it can be updated is mtn git_export.

The way to commit changes to Samizdat is to send me your `mtn pubkey`
and stake out a private branch namespace starting with
samizdat-dev-<yourname>. The way to propagate changes from there to
samizdat-head is to propose a merge on this mailing list or in Savannah
trackers.

As always, feedback is welcome!

-- 
Dmitry Borodaenko